100 Notable Books of 2017

The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. This list represents books reviewed since Dec. 4, 2016, when we published our previous Notables list.

Fiction & Poetry

AMERICAN WAR. By Omar El Akkad. (Knopf, $26.95.) This haunting debut novel imagines the events that lead up to and follow the Second American Civil War at the turn of the 22nd century.

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. By Elizabeth Strout. (Random House, $27.) This audacious novel is about small-town characters struggling to make sense of past family traumas.

AUTUMN. By Ali Smith. (Pantheon, $24.95.) Smith’s ingenious novel is about the friendship between a 101-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman in Britain after the Brexit vote.

BAD DREAMS AND OTHER STORIES. By Tessa Hadley. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Hadley serves up the bitter along with the delicious in these 10 stories.

BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS. By Lawrence Osborne. (Hogarth, $25.) On a Greek island, two wealthy young women encounter a handsome Syrian refugee, whom they endeavor to help, with disastrous results.

THE BOOK OF JOAN. By Lidia Yuknavitch. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) In this brilliant novel, Earth, circa 2049, has been devastated by global warming and war.

A BOY IN WINTER. By Rachel Seiffert. (Pantheon, $25.95.) Seiffert’s intricate novel probes the bonds and betrayals in a Ukrainian town as it succumbs to Hitler.

EXIT WEST. By Mohsin Hamid. (Riverhead, $26.) The new novel by the author of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” mixes global unrest with a bit of the fantastic.

FAST. By Jorie Graham. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Graham created these poems against a backdrop of personal and political trauma — her parents are dying, she is undergoing cancer treatment, the nation is mired in war and ecological crisis.

FIVE-CARAT SOUL. By James McBride. (Riverhead, $27.) In his delightful first story collection, the author of the National Book Award-winning novel “The Good Lord Bird” continues to explore race, masculinity, music and history.

FOREST DARK. By Nicole Krauss. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Tracing the lives of two Americans in Israel, this restless novel explores the mysteries of disconnection and the divided self.

4 3 2 1. By Paul Auster. (Holt, $32.50.) Auster’s book is an epic bildungsroman that presents the reader with four versions of the formative years of a Jewish boy born in Newark in 1947.

FRESH COMPLAINT: Stories. By Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Eugenides’s expert debut collection of short stories is his first book since “The Marriage Plot” in 2011.

FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD. By Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins, $28.99.) What if human beings are neither inevitable nor ultimate? That’s the premise of Erdrich’s fascinating new novel.

THE IDIOT. By Elif Batuman. (Penguin Press, $27.) An innocent, language-intoxicated teenager, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives at Harvard in the ’90s to pursue love and (especially) literature in Batuman’s hefty, gorgeous digressive slab of a novel.

A KIND OF FREEDOM. By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. (Counterpoint, $26.) This assured first novel shines an unflinching, compassionate light on three generations of a black family in New Orleans.

LESS. By Andrew Sean Greer. (Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown, $26.) On the eve of his 50th birthday and a former lover’s wedding, a mediocre novelist takes refuge in literary invitations that enable him to travel around the world.

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO. By George Saunders. (Random House, $28.) In this Man Booker Prize-winning first novel by a master of the short story, Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his son Willie in 1862, and is surrounded by ghosts in purgatory.

MANHATTAN BEACH. By Jennifer Egan. (Scribner, $28.) Egan’s engaging novel tells overlapping stories, but is most fundamentally about a young woman who works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard during World War II.

MRS. OSMOND. By John Banville. (Knopf, $27.95.) Banville’s sequel to Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady” follows Isabel Archer back to Rome and the possible end of her marriage.

MY ABSOLUTE DARLING. By Gabriel Tallent. (Riverhead, $27.) The heroine of this debut novel is Turtle, a 14-year-old who grows up feral in the forests and hills of Northern California.

NEW PEOPLE. By Danzy Senna. (Riverhead, $26.) Senna’s sinister and charming novel, about a married couple who are both biracial, riffs on themes she’s made her own — about what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home, and under the skin.

THE NINTH HOUR. By Alice McDermott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In McDermott’s novel, the cause of a young Irish widow and her daughter is taken up by the nuns of a Brooklyn convent.

PACHINKO. By Min Jin Lee. (Grand Central, $27.) This stunning novel chronicling four generations of an ethnic Korean family in Japan is about outsiders and much more.

THE POWER. By Naomi Alderman. (Little, Brown, $26.) In this fierce and unsettling novel, the ability to generate a dangerous electrical force from their bodies lets women take control, resulting in a vast, systemic upheaval of gender dynamics across the globe.

THE REFUGEES. By Viet Thanh Nguyen. (Grove, $25.) This superb collection of stories concerns men and women displaced from wartime Saigon and (mostly) settled in California.

SELECTION DAY. By Aravind Adiga. (Scribner, $26.) Adiga’s third novel (he won the Booker Prize in 2008 for “The White Tiger”) is a sharp look at modern India. It revolves around two teenage brothers groomed by their father to be cricket stars.

A SEPARATION. By Katie Kitamura. (Riverhead, $25.) Deceptions pile on deceptions in this coolly unsettling postmodern mystery, in which a British woman travels to a Greek fishing village to search for her estranged husband, who has disappeared.

SING, UNBURIED, SING. By Jesmyn Ward. (Scribner, $26.) Ward’s novel, which won the National Book Award, combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with an exploration of the long aftershocks of a hurricane.

SIX FOUR. By Hideo Yokoyama. Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) A former criminal investigator, now working in police media relations, faces angry reporters, the nagging 14-year-old case of a kidnapped girl, and his own teenage daughter’s disappearance.

STAY WITH ME. By Ayobami Adebayo. (Knopf, $25.95.) This debut novel is a portrait of a marriage in Nigeria beginning in the politically tumultous 1980s.

THE STONE SKY: The Broken Earth: Book Three. By N.K. Jemisin. (Orbit, paper, $16.99.) Jemisin won a Hugo Award for each of the first two novels in her Broken Earth trilogy. In the extraordinary conclusion, a mother and daughter do geologic battle for the fate of the earth.

TIES. By Domenico Starnone. Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri. (Europa, paper, $16.) The husband of the woman who has been identified as Elena Ferrante offers a powerful novel about a fraying marriage.

TRANSIT. By Rachel Cusk. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In the second novel of a planned trilogy, Cusk continues the story of Faye, a writer and teacher who is recently divorced and semi-broke.

WAKING LIONS. By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Translated by Sondra Silverston. (Little, Brown, $26.) An Israeli doctor in the Negev accidentally hits an Eritrean immigrant, then drives off. The consequences are explored with insight and a thriller’s twists and turns.

WHEREAS. By Layli Long Soldier. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) Long Soldier, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, troubles our consideration of the language we use to carry our personal and national narratives in this moving debut poetry collection.

WHITE TEARS. By Hari Kunzru. (Knopf, $26.95.) This complex ghost story about racial privilege, cultural appropriation and the blues is written with Kunzru’s customary eloquence and skill.

WHO IS RICH?By Matthew Klam. Illustrated by John Cuneo. (Random House, $27.) The protagonist of this novel, a middle-aged illustrator, is a conflicted adulterer. Klam agilely balances an existentially tragic story line with morbid humor and self-assured prose.

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CreditOlimpia Zagnoli

Nonfiction

AGE OF ANGER: A History of the Present. By Pankaj Mishra. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Mishra argues that broad swaths of the globe are reliving the traumas and violent dislocations that accompanied Europe’s transition to modernity in the 18th and 19th centuries.

THE BLOOD OF EMMETT TILL. By Timothy B. Tyson. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) Tyson’s absorbing retelling of the events leading up to the horrific lynching in 1955 includes an admission from Till’s accuser that some of her testimony was false.

BORN A CRIME: Stories From a South African Childhood. By Trevor Noah. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) The host of “The Daily Show” writes about growing up in South Africa under apartheid, and about the country’s rocky transition into the post-apartheid era in the 1990s.

CHURCHILL AND ORWELL: The Fight for Freedom. By Thomas E. Ricks. (Penguin Press, $28.) This enjoyable dual biography draws out the common causes of these 20th-century giants: two independent thinkers and opponents of totalitarianism whose influence remains pervasive today.

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney. (New York Review Books, $19.95.) The landmark American critic surveys everything from the 1968 Democratic convention to the literature of New York City.

A COLONY IN A NATION. By Chris Hayes. (Norton, $26.95.) Hayes paints a portrait of two “distinct regimes” in America — one for whites, which he calls the Nation; the other for blacks, which he calls the Colony.

THE DAWN WATCH: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. By Maya Jasanoff. (Penguin Press, $30.) Conrad explored the frontiers of a globalized world at the turn of the last century. Jasanoff uses Conrad’s novels and his biography to tell the history of that moment, one that mirrors our own.

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES. By Dan Egan. (Norton, $27.95.) Climate change, population growth and invasive species are destabilizing the Great Lakes’ wobbly ecosystem, but Egan provides a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.

THE EVANGELICALS: The Struggle to Shape America. By Frances FitzGerald. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) FitzGerald’s fair-minded history focuses on the doctrinal and political issues that have concerned white conservative Protestants since they abandoned their traditional separation from the world and merged with the Republican Party.

FRIENDS DIVIDED: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. By Gordon S. Wood. (Penguin Press, $35.) Wood traces the long, fraught ties between the second and third presidents, and sides almost reluctantly with Jefferson in their philosophical smack-down.

THE FUTURE IS HISTORY: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. By Masha Gessen. (Riverhead, $28.) Gessen, a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin, tells the story of modern Russia through the eyes of seven individuals who found that politics was a force none of them could escape; winner of the National Book Award.

GRANT. By Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.) Chernow gives us a Grant for our time, recounting not only the victories of the general but also the challenges of a president who fought against the K.K.K.

THE GULF: The Making of an American Sea. By Jack E. Davis. (Liveright, $29.95.) Davis’s sweeping history of the Gulf of Mexico takes into account colorful nature, idiosyncratic human characters and economic development.

KRAZY: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White. By Michael Tisserand. (Harper/HarperCollins, $35.) Who was the man behind “Krazy Kat”? This fascinating biography and guide to the work of the cartoonist, who passed for white, tells the full story.

LETTERMAN: The Last Giant of Late Night. By Jason Zinoman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.) Zinoman’s lively book does impressive triple duty as an acute portrait of stardom, an insightful chronicle of three rambunctious decades of pop-culture evolution, and a very brainy fan’s notes.

LOCKING UP OUR OWN: Crime and Punishment in Black America. By James Forman Jr. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A masterly account of how a generation of black elected officials wrestled with crises of violence and drug use by unleashing the brutal power of the criminal justice system on their constituents.

PRIESTDADDY: A Memoir. By Patricia Lockwood. (Riverhead, $27.) The poet’s memoir is fueled by a great character: her father, a rare married Catholic priest, a big bear of a man fond of guns, cream liqueurs and pork rinds.

WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: An American Tragedy. By Ta-Nehisi Coates. (One World, $28.) A selection of Coates’s most influential pieces about race in America from The Atlantic, with subjects including Barack and Michelle Obama, Donald J. Trump, reparations and mass incarceration.

WHAT HAPPENED. By Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Clinton tells the story of what it was like to run for president of the United States as the first female nominee of a major party.

YOU SAY TO BRICK: The Life of Louis Kahn. By Wendy Lesser. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) This biography covers the best-known works of the architect Louis Kahn as well as his complicated personal life.